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Re: wheezy-based refracta beta2 bugs, discuss, kudos, whatev

Fri Nov 23, 2012 6:48 pm

Note that the new way of doing persistence is with a persistence.conf file in the root of the persistence partition (or loopback file)

Although the partition or loopback can be labelled "persistence", "home-rw" or "live-rw", the conf file tells the system what it should do

Also all references to "persistent" on cmdline must change to "persistence"

Here is my working (full-) persistence.conf (note the dot)
Code:
# persistence backwards compatibility:
/ union,source=.

best of luck to you working out how to configure your own :mrgreen:
Code:
man persistence.conf
Last edited by dzz on Sat Nov 24, 2012 10:29 am, edited 1 time in total.

Re: wheezy-based refracta beta2 bugs, discuss, kudos, whatev

Sat Nov 24, 2012 3:43 am

First, I tried changing the boot line from "persistent" to "persistence". That didn't work, but it did result in a persistence.conf appearing on the root of the home-rw partition. I had to re-label the partition to "persistence" to get it to work. Great, now it shows up on the desktop as "persistence" instead of "home-rw".

Contents of persistence.conf:
Code:
/home   bind,source=.

Re: wheezy-based refracta beta2 bugs, discuss, kudos, whatev

Sun Nov 25, 2012 12:31 am

beta3 is uploading now - http://distro.ibiblio.org/refracta/testing/

Installed: xfce4-power-manager pm-utils gtk-theme-switch bleachbit galternatives winff winff-doc gecko-mediaplayer libgpod-common gnome-keyring gkdebconf libgtk2-perl cryptkeeper ccrypt pacpl abcde parted wicd

Installed from sid repo: live-boot live-boot-initramfs-tools live-config live-config-sysvinit live-boot-doc live-config-doc live-tools

Removed set-tzk script, created time-sync script, which runs ntpdate-debian, and can use yad or zenity. All 'dpkg-reconfigure whatever' can be done graphically with gkdebconf.

Removed murrine-themes, but had to keep gtk2-engines-murrine to get rid of error messages when running snapshot.

Turned off numlock in .config...xfwm4.xml (in user and skel directories)

Did not remove any portions of gnome-icons. Most of the space is taken up by icon-theme.cache, and I don't know what to do with that.

Re: wheezy-based refracta beta2 bugs, discuss, kudos, whatev

Sun Nov 25, 2012 2:38 am

will test beta3 as soon as... thanks for the fixes

RE persistence: a few observations (using a ext2 loopback file here)

It doesn't work here either, if not labelled "persistence". I don't get why it can write a conf file in live- or home-rw then doesn't actually use it.

It doesn't work if the "persistence" volume/file is missing persistence.conf. You have to create it manually.

Code:
/home   bind,source=.


I tried that and it wouldn't log in because /home was empty (except for persistence.conf)! Presumably "bind" means a complete /home setup must already exist in "persistence" ? Anyway,this sorted it, now just the changes go there:
Code:
/home   union,source=.


BTW the only way to find out /home was empty was to log in to xfce as root! The lightdm login screen has no console login option.

What does work well is "debug" on cmdline .. in /var/log/live/boot.log and -config.log, you can see what has happened (but making sense of it all is another matter)

Next battle: live-hooks

Re: wheezy-based refracta beta2 bugs, discuss, kudos, whatev

Sun Nov 25, 2012 4:56 am

Don't try to download it yet - I'm on the fourth attempt. It should be 644MB when it's done. Tried sftp, then ssh and wget, then sshfs and rsync. Can't get the md5sum to match. I think this happened before. Also got told I was out of space, even though I deleted beta2 first, and I deleted a few things before I added beta1, so I know that I'm using less space than I was before.

Yes, I copied my home to the home-rw partition first. And I didn't have to create persistence.conf - it appeared at some point when I was trying to boot the usb stick with persistence.

Re: wheezy-based refracta beta2 bugs, discuss, kudos, whatev

Sun Nov 25, 2012 12:11 pm

beta3 is up, and the md5sum is correct. I deleted the 64-bit squeeze iso to make room. Looks like the disk limit is 2GB or slightly less.

Here's the direct link to the iso -
http://distro.ibiblio.org/refracta/test ... 4_1248.iso

Here's the direct link to the zsync file -
http://distro.ibiblio.org/refracta/test ... .iso.zsync

md5sum -
64a8f1996a3eac02221ed4a03d551f72

.

Re: wheezy-based refracta beta2 bugs, discuss, kudos, whatev

Mon Feb 18, 2013 3:17 pm

fsmithred wrote: I have mixed feelings about adblock. Many free websites depend upon advertising for their funding. As it is, noscript can block the obnoxious flashy ads.

On the one hand ad's are annoying, and more than just a bit.
But, on the other hand: sites which use a lot of ad's are barely usable on very low specs
(and i ain't got any flash installed at all).
There are sites where i can't even scroll up and down. All i can do is close the site.

Oh, and with low specs i mean: too low to install and use iceweasel. Using midori: i haven't figured out how to block ads. netsurf blocks them (well: is not able to show them :-) , but i set it to use a proxy (tor/i2p). dillo and lynx are good, but for some tasks i really need a web-browser with some comfort (say copy and paste, tabs, find, etc).
The sites might be free, paid by ads, but i for one can't use them that way (not sure if they make any money by that).

None of that is a reason to add adblock to refracta
I'm just chatting. Mainly about what the web has become.
The same is valid for all the cool social networks, which think it is comfort if they automatically scroll for me, instead of letting me decide when i want to see more content. On low specs they make the browser freeze. With good specs the screen jumps back and forth, which is not much better :-) I simply stay at the top of the screen to avoid it. lol.

Re: wheezy-based refracta beta2 bugs, discuss, kudos, whatev

Mon Feb 18, 2013 4:55 pm

Adblock Plus has an "Element Hiding" feature that shows the html structure so you can target all the rotating, scrolling, sliding thingies that have infected the web. Sometimes I can't even look at a site until I nuke all that stuff.

Re: wheezy-based refracta beta2 bugs, discuss, kudos, whatev

Sun Mar 10, 2013 3:02 am

A problem has been noticed here, with the default Refracta menu, for some time.

If using usb with syslinux it should be a simple matter of changing occurences of "isolinux" with "syslinux" in the menus. That should also apply with extlinux, pxelinux.. the menu layouts are essentially the same.

Using the default Refracta menus with syslinux there is a problem using the "tab" key to edit the cmdline. The cmdline text fills the screen and scrolls uncontrollably when trying to use the left arrow key to edit something. Same behaviour observed on more than one machine.

Can anyone else verify that?

Re: wheezy-based refracta beta2 bugs, discuss, kudos, whatev

Sun Mar 10, 2013 7:51 pm

Uh... I can verify that there's something weird when you try to edit the boot command line. I think I noticed that the whole line prints every time I hit the backspace key. Maybe I saw it with left arrow key. I know that I don't want to make any errors when I'm appending cmdline, just because of this behavior.
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